ScottW514
adcd1adb9a
forgectrl pin 47e4256: the airflow floors set from the bench measurement (exhaust 6400, intake 2290, air assist 6000 rpm, purge current 300, grace 15 s) and the operating-point rule: a fan is judged while the laser is armed, when a job's profile may raise it but never lower it below the run duty, or whenever it is commanded at the run duty; the service's hunts, sent with the extraction fans off, are measured and published unjudged. Catalog: cloud.mode-switch now waits out the connect-time hunt sampling /cool/status and requires no AIRFLOW, the exhaust row unjudged and the exhaust actually off; its covers gain forgectrl src/cool.* and src/airflow.*. cooling.fan-gate-trips uses an 8 s test grace (the intakes take 7 s to 90 percent and tripped under the old 2 s at the new floor) and its off leg waits for the row state as well as gates_off. fan_floor_measure.py names a reply that is not JSON and calls the purge readings idle and run (the pump is always on). Docs: COOLING 3a and the settings table, BRINGUP item 19 and a facts-bank entry with the measured fan speeds, the bench README, and a CAMPAIGN-LOG entry for the measurement, the two status-document finds, the hunt find and the hot-deployed bench runs of both tests.
OpenGlow/ForgeFIRM Firmware for Glowforge
⚠️ IN DEVELOPMENT — NOT YET RELEASED
ForgeFIRM has no public release yet. No images are published, nothing here is installable, and there is no supported way to put this on a machine. The documentation describes the firmware as it is being built and validated on the bench — it is here to be read, not followed.
If you come across a file claiming to be a ForgeFIRM image, it did not come from this project.
What this costs
Nothing. It cost nothing yesterday, it costs nothing today, and if anyone ever charges you for it, it wasn't this project.
ForgeFIRM is free in both senses: free as in beer, free as in speech. All of it is public. The image, the build layers, the kernel module, the control daemon, the grblHAL driver, the cloud client, down to the brackets you print. The licenses (MIT and GPL) are the standard ones, and any lawyer will tell you they're not a trap. Read it, build it, change it, pass it on.
No paid tier. No license key, no subscription, no activation, no Pro edition, no feature parked behind a paywall. Nothing is held back for a rainy day, mostly because there's no plan for a rainy day.
The work happens in public, including the parts that don't work yet, which are written up with more candor than flatters anyone. There's no product page. No waitlist, no pre-order, no backer, no launch, nothing to buy. Anyone who spends their evenings deleting sales pitches has earned the reflex to suspect one more, so don't take a stranger's word for it. Ten minutes with the licenses and the commit log settles it, which beats trust on both cost and accuracy. Questions are welcome at the community forum.
If someone offers to sell you this firmware, the licenses allow it and nobody's calling it theft. Just note that you'd be paying for something that's given away, and that what you take home is their build, not this one: a stranger's code, running a laser that has no opinion about what it burns. Get it from the source. Same price everywhere, and here you get to read what you're running.
Open-source firmware for Glowforge brand CNC lasers. ForgeFIRM replaces the cloud-dependent factory software on the stock control board — no hardware modification — and gives the machine a local controller, a local web control panel, and a standard Grbl interface.
- Latest Release
- Installation Instructions
- Build Instructions
- Connecting LightBurn
- How motion and the laser are driven
- How cooling and airflow work
- The cameras and the video stream
- How the laser safing works
- How a release is accepted
- Community Support
What it does
Two controller modes, selected in the web panel and switchable while the machine is idle:
- GRBL mode — grblHAL runs on the machine and speaks Grbl 1.1 over TCP port 23, so LightBurn, UGS, and cncjs drive the laser directly. Motion runs on the board's own hardware step engine (SDMA + EPIT), fed live by the planner. M3/M4 dynamic laser power, coolant-flow verification, over-temp holds, and an operator button press to arm the laser for each job.
- Cloud mode — the machine presents itself as a stock Glowforge to the Glowforge web service, so the phone and web apps work as they always did. Optional, and off by default. GRBL mode jogs and cuts without it; the one GRBL-mode function that still reaches the Glowforge service is camera-referenced homing (below), until limit-switch homing lands.
Around both modes:
- A web control panel on port 8080: machine status and position, coolant and fan telemetry, safety-switch states, camera view, machine settings, hardware diagnostics, firmware updates, and boot-slot management.
- Camera-referenced homing:
$Hfrom any sender runs the factory-style camera homing cycle through the Glowforge service (a Glowforge account and a live service session are required for$H; everything else in GRBL mode runs without them), and the machine records where it is. - Cameras only capture with the lid closed. The lid camera faces the room once the lid is raised, so ForgeFIRM refuses every capture — live view, snapshot, and anything the Glowforge service asks for in cloud mode — until the enclosure is shut, and stops a running stream the moment the lid opens. See the cameras and the video stream.
Hardware
The control board is common to Glowforge Basic, Plus, and Pro. The 5 MP (OV5648) camera modules are fully supported and hardware-validated. The 8 MP (OV8856) modules found in "HD" units have a complete capture path — the kernel patches, device tree and sensor-aware capture profile they need are all in the build — but it has never run on an 8 MP machine, so treat it as untested; see the camera note in kas/README.md.
Safety
These machines contain a CO₂ laser: it burns, blinds, and starts fires. Never defeat the lid switches or interlock. Never leave a running job unattended — keep a fire extinguisher within reach. Read Before you cut — safety before your first job, and the Regulatory and legal section before installing. How the laser safing works describes the hardware safety chain and the software gates ForgeFIRM stacks on it.
A very important warning: this is experimental software. Use of this software could seriously maim or kill you or others, and voids your warranty. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by Glowforge. Use it at your own risk.